Google Yourself
And remove your personal information!
What am I suggesting and why?
Exactly what it says! Google yourself! Go to google.com and type in your full name. Have a common name? Type in your name and your state. Still too common? Type in your name and the name of your workplace. You’ll almost certainly find something.
Look through the many pages of results and find all the pages that are actually about you. Open them up and see what you find.
You may find very personal details like where you live currently, places you’ve lived in the past, places you’ve worked, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., etc. Request this information to be removed from Google and also from the websites that hold the information, if possible.
Repeat for other search engines (yahoo.com, duckduckgo.com, search.brave.com, bing.com).
You in? Let’s go…
First, find yourself (see above). Look deep within the search results, and see who you really are. Or aren’t. Sometimes this stuff is just amalgamated from many sources and doesn’t make sense.
Removing Results from Google
If you find personally identifying information that you want to be removed from Google…
- Open the search result in a new tab. You can do this by right-clicking on it and selecting open in a new tab, or you can hold CTRL or ⌘ on the keyboard and then click on the search result.
- Look for the three-dot menu next to the search result. Click on it.
- A panel will open that says “About this result”.
- At the bottom of the panel, click Remove result.
- They’ll ask why you’d like to remove the result. Select the appropriate option.
- Confirm any information that is requested from within the search result (this is why I recommended opening the search result in a new tab, you may need to refer back to the website).
You can track your removal requests (and be aware, they are just requests… Google is not required to comply with the request) by visiting their Results about you page.
Removing Results from Other Search Engines
Unfortunately, this is not as straightforward. Bing has a Content Removal Tool, but I had no luck with it. They say they’ll only remove content that is out of date or that are broken links, but when I submitted broken links they still threw an error. The other search engines don’t seem to have so much as a support page about removing content. They’ll just tell you…
Your best bet is to try and have the content removed from the site itself. I did have some luck with this on a work aggregator called SignalHire. I just contacted them through their online chat, and the page about me was removed immediately. It may not be that simple with others, alas.
Dig Deeper
There’s not a lot that we have control over here in the U.S., but in other places (E.U. for example) there are data laws that help protect users’ privacy with search results. One big step in this direction was part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), informally referred to as the “right to be forgotten.” There are no such federal protections here in the U.S.
Coincidentally, GDPR is also why you get all those cookie notifications. Fun fact.
Learn More
- “Right to Be Forgotten” The First Amendment Encyclopedia
- “Most Americans support right to have some personal info removed from online searches” Pew Research Center
- “Why the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Won’t Make it to the United States” Michigan Technology Law Review
